Like genes and proteins, cells can use biochemical networks to sense and process information. The differentiation of the cell state in colonic crypts forms a typical unidirectional phenotypic transitional cascade, in which stem cells differentiate into the transit-amplifying cells (TACs), and TACs continue to differentiate into fully differentiated cells. In order to quantitatively describe the relationship between the noise of each compartment and the amplification of signals, the gain factor is introduced, and the gain-fluctuation relation is obtained by using the linear noise approximation of the master equation. Through the simulation of these theoretical formulas, the characters of noise propagation and amplification are studied. It is found that the transmitted noise is an important part of the total noise in each downstream cell. Therefore, a small number of downstream cells can only cause its small inherent noise, but the total noise may be very large due to the transmitted noise. The influence of the transmitted noise may be the indirect cause of colon cancer. In addition, the total noise of the downstream cells always has a minimum value. As long as a reasonable value of the gain factor is selected, the number of cells in colonic crypts will be controlled within the normal range. This may be a good method to intervene the uncontrollable growth of tumor cells and effectively control the deterioration of colon cancer.A general theory of liquid crystals is presented, starting from the group-theory symmetry analysis of the constituting molecules. A particular attention is paid to the type of elastic free-energies and their relationships with the molecular symmetries. The orientational order-parameter tensors are identified for each molecular symmetry, in a consideration of consistently keeping the leading, characteristic elastic free energies in a model. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/pr-619.html The order parameters are expressed in terms of symmetric traceless tensors, some of high orders, for all major molecular symmetries, including seven groups of axial symmetries and seven groups of polyhedral symmetries. For spatially inhomogeneous liquid crystals, the couplings of these tensors in the elastic energies are derived by expanding the interaction energies between these molecules. The aim is to provide a general view of the molecular symmetries of individual molecules, orientational order parameters characterizing the orientational distribution functions, and the elastic free energies, all under one single group-theory approach.We study the off-diagonal matrix elements of observables that break the translational symmetry of a spin-chain Hamiltonian, and as such connect energy eigenstates from different total quasimomentum sectors. We consider quantum-chaotic and interacting integrable points of the Hamiltonian, and focus on average energies at the center of the spectrum. In the quantum-chaotic model, we find that there is eigenstate thermalization; specifically, the matrix elements are Gaussian distributed with a variance that is a smooth function of ω=E_α-E_β (E_α are the eigenenergies) and scales as 1/D (D is the Hilbert space dimension). In the interacting integrable model, we find that the matrix elements exhibit a skewed log-normal-like distribution and have a variance that is also a smooth function of ω that scales as 1/D. We study in detail the low-frequency behavior of the variance of the matrix elements to unveil the regimes in which it exhibits diffusive or ballistic scaling. We show that in the quantum-chaotic model the behavior of the variance is qualitatively similar for matrix elements that connect eigenstates from the same versus different quasimomentum sectors. We also show that this is not the case in the interacting integrable model for observables whose translationally invariant counterpart does not break integrability if added as a perturbation to the Hamiltonian.Using the phase field crystal model (PFC model), an analysis of slow and fast dynamics of solid-liquid interfaces in solidification and melting processes is presented. Dynamical regimes for cubic lattices invading metastable liquids (solidification) and liquids propagating into metastable crystals (melting) are described in terms of the evolving amplitudes of the density field. Dynamical equations are obtained for body-centered cubic (bcc) and face-centered cubic (fcc) crystal lattices in one- and two-mode approximations. A universal form of the amplitude equations is obtained for the three-dimensional dynamics for different crystal lattices and crystallographic directions. Dynamics of the amplitude's propagation for different lattices and PFC mode's approximations is qualitatively compared. The traveling-wave velocity is quantitatively compared with data of molecular dynamics simulation previously obtained by Mendelev et al. [Modell. Simul. Mater. Sci. Eng. 18, 074002 (2010)MSMEEU0965-039310.1088/0965-0393/18/7/074002] for solidification and melting of the aluminum fcc lattice.The present paper considers the time evolution of a charged test particle of mass m in a constant temperature heat bath of a second charged particle of mass M. The time dependence of the distribution function of the test particles is given by a Fokker-Planck equation with a diffusion coefficient for Coulomb collisions as well as a diffusion coefficient for wave-particle interactions. For the mass ratio m/M→0, the steady distribution is a Kappa distribution which has been employed in space physics to fit observed particle energy spectra. The time dependence of the distribution functions with some initial value is expressed in terms of the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the linear Fokker-Planck operator and also interpreted with the transformation to a Schrödinger equation. We also consider the explicit time dependence of the distribution function with a discretization of the Fokker-Planck equation. We study the stability of the Kappa distribution to Coulomb collisions.Heterogeneous diffusion processes (HDPs) with space-dependent diffusion coefficients D(x) are found in a number of real-world systems, such as for diffusion of macromolecules or submicron tracers in biological cells. Here, we examine HDPs in quenched-disorder systems with Gaussian colored noise (GCN) characterized by a diffusion coefficient with a power-law dependence on the particle position and with a spatially random scaling exponent. Typically, D(x) is considered to be centerd at the origin and the entire x axis is characterized by a single scaling exponent α. In this work we consider a spatially random scenario in periodic intervals ("layers") in space D(x) is centerd to the midpoint of each interval. In each interval the scaling exponent α is randomly chosen from a Gaussian distribution. The effects of the variation of the scaling exponents, the periodicity of the domains ("layer thickness") of the diffusion coefficient in this stratified system, and the correlation time of the GCN are analyzed numerically in detail.